According to Microsoft, Necurs is spreading quickly and has deemed the rootkit a “prevalent threat.” Distributed mostly by drive-by downloads, the Necrus outbreak reinforces Wave’s stance that security needs to be at the hardware level beneath the malware rather than just at the software level competing with the malware. "To help mitigate such [rootkit] attacks, security professionals need to be turning their focus beyond traditional AV scanning – looking under the hood at the BIOS,” said Bob Thibadeau, chief scientist at Wave. “NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) agrees, long espousing the need for measuring BIOS integrity for the early detection of such threats, pointing to the integral role that industry standard hardware plays.”